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November 17, 2023 – Anthem, Part 7-9

November 17, 2023 /

These three chapters are the heart of the book. I suppose it is serendipitous that I chose to break the book up in this way. So, let’s get into it.

Chapter seven begins with Equality 7-2521 marching into the World Counsel of Scholars with his lightbulb. It went exactly how I expected that it would. In fear for his life, Equality escapes the city into the forest where he is sure no one will ever come after him. After surviving the night, he understands that he will never be able to return. The next day, who shows up in the woods out of the blue but the Golden One. Apparently, she has pretty good tracking ability.

It is pretty easy pickings to figure out what to talk about with this session. It is the sunk cost fallacy and the Council of Scholars. First of all, to be in the conversation you have to be part of the group. “A Street Sweeper! A Street Sweeper walking in upon the World Counsel of Scholars! It is not to be believed! It is against all the rules and all the laws!”. The first level of security is only having conversations with those initiated and approved.

There is now a closed feedback loop for any ideas. Once Equality connected the lightbulb, now there was sheer terror in the room. For some unknown reason, the light scared the scholars. But, then the next tool that is used is the power play. “How dare you think that your mind held greater wisdom than the mind of your brothers? And if the Councils had decreed that you should be a Street Sweeper, how dared you think that you could be of greater use to men than sweeping the street?”

Oh, but why? “Then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles. The candle is a great boon to mankind, as approved by all men. Therefore it cannot be destroyed by the whim of one man.” So, this is the real problem. I don’t know if they were shocked that someone found something that they were not supposed to or that they were scared of the technology, both are possible.

How many times have we seen something surpassed by better technology? Using the automobile, it is clear that the 2023 version is highly superior (in most aspects) to the 1963 version. I can state this empirically because looking at studies, the average age of a vehicle on the road is 12 years old. In 1963, vehicles were lucky to make it to 100,000 miles. In fact, some vehicles in the 1970s were lucky to survive more than a handful of years.

On the other hand, how many times have we seen government prevent innovation by doing things for our own good. Let us just use the minimum square footage building requirement. This is strictly to protect tax base. Look at old houses that are one bedroom and one bathroom. The way this is effecting innovation is that it is not rewarding good design. It is also wastes resources via utilities, heating, cooling and lighting unused space. I don’t think that we suffer from houses that are too small, we suffer from poorly designed houses. If there is limitless space, there is no incentive to build better structures from an ergonomics standpoint.

Finally, there are forces in the industrial military complex that desperately want to replace the A-10. But, then there are greater forces that do not see the need. Why replace something that does the job effectively. This is the final insight, money of course. If something perpetually did the job and did it well, it negatively impacts someone’s ability to profit on the change. But then again, there is always the opposite perspective of someone supporting the status quo.

End Your Programming Routine: I am resisting the urge to jump ahead since I have already finished the book at this point. But, I am controlling myself. I don’t really understand the fear of the woods outside of the city. I don’t rationalize how they travel or even have a network of other cities if they are so contained to the space. But, I guess those are questions that won’t get answered. For now, I will settle on fighting the status quo head to head is bound to be nearly impossible.

November 16, 2023 – So Many Updates

November 16, 2023 /

I believe this to be true, the more you look the more you see. Since my third foray into Linux, I have been more dedicated and paid more attention to how it behaves. Today is going to be for those who don’t know much or are considering Linux, pretty much like me. If you are an old hat (or Redhat) then nothing I am going to say is revolutionary.

Let’s start at the beginning. Linux is an open source operating system. For that reason, there are many distributions or flavors if you will. So, I have tried Ubuntu and Mint as my distributions. They both branch off of Linux called Debian but then further fork into their own distinct operating systems. Think of it this way, the distribution has a bunch or other programs wrapped on top of the operating system. These are things like word processing, spreadsheets, email programs are all part of the distribution.

Part of the reason that this is important is because when you go to look for programs to install or support, you need to know what type of distribution you have. Different distributions will have different programs and even syntax on how to do it. I think that the Ubuntu/Mint is the dominant distribution so fortunately you can usually find something that works. But, there are literally almost infinite possibilities. Talk about confusing for a newbie.

Open Source means exactly what it says. Anyone with the technical chops could create their own version or distribution of Linux. I don’t know exactly how you get involved in Ubuntu, but somebody has some passion for some element which drives change. These could be error fixes or enhancements or even new features.

I think that we are all used to update notifications in the software in our lives. Now that I have been using Ubuntu daily, I am noticing a high number of updates. I would estimate that there is one every three or four days. In some ways, this is the beauty of Linux. We the user have a chance to say yes we want them or no we do not. I myself being just a casual user and not having any real reason not to do them, just say yes. Since it is not my primary computer, it feels like I log in daily to see if I have any updates to run.

It seems like everything Linux does fine. But, I am seeing a problem with firmware updates. I have one that won’t take because Microsoft forces a signature of the hardrive and the motherboard (even though I am not even running Windows). The supposed risk is that someone could physically login and defeat my security. I am not too worried about that since it is at my home. My current strategy will be to ignore it but it does annoy me that the warning pops up as a to do.

One thing that I think is neat is that with each version, the home page background changes. The lobster has now become a minotaur (and a maze) since I updated to 23.10. I guess one other caveat, if you stop frequently updating, you can get out of sync. This happened to me when I ignored the computer for a few months and then I couldn’t perform the incremental updates. It wasn’t until a major revision that I got back in sync.

End Your Programming Routine: Having to do all these things is the beauty and the pain of Linux. I have a lot of control and a lot of responsibility. I want to say that I have been pretty impressed what you can get for free and pretty light weight in its footprint. It is pretty cool that it can be booted from a USB stick and is really a full featured computer. If your are willing to do the work of learning and research, it definitely works.

November 15, 2023 – Just the Good Old Boys

November 15, 2023 /

Maybe I shouldn’t even be writing this but I have a hankering to watch The Dukes of Hazzard lately. It was on TV from 1979 to 1985 and it was definitely my favorite show on TV. In fact, it was the only show on TV that we were permitted to watch. I was four when it started and ten when it ended.

Until around middle school, my brother and my bedtime was 8pm. That means that any prime time TV was out of the question. TV was also severely restricted in our house as well. We got to choose one TV show a week that we were permitted to watch. This is what we chose of course.

Even Saturday morning cartoons got the boot early in my life. My mom thought that my brother and I got too wound up after watching them. I knew that was the edict but I still liked to turn on the TV in the morning before anybody was a up. With the old manual TVs, you could turn the volume down and then turn on the TV. One morning I woke up and the cord was cut on the TV. That ended that.

I think I know the trigger here. I have been looking at CB radios a lot lately. Since CB became super popular in the 1970s, it played a prominent role in the Dukes of Hazzard. All the vehicles, including the General Lee had CBs and the characters communicated via radio during their hijinks. You also had other souped-up cars like the 1976/77 Pontiac Firebird on Smokey and the Bandit during that time that were using CB radio.

This is not to forget the General Lee is a 1969 Dodge Charger and I am helping my son out with his 1969 Mercury Cougar here and there. I was running errands a couple weekends ago and I saw a 1969 Ford Ranchero and all the sudden I was looking up prices of project cars. It seems like my destiny is colliding with The Dukes of Hazzard.

The truth is, as much as I liked the show, I remember very little. I love car chases and jumps. Put a brush guard on a hot rod/race car and drive it like you stole it. Who can resist siding with Robin Hood. I might remind you that Bo and Luke were (wrongly) convicted felons and so firearms were prohibited, that is why they used bows. My brother and I ate that stuff up. Western wear and Daisy Dukes… I am talking myself into buying the entire show since I cannot rent it and it is not streaming anywhere.

Finishing the highlights, the theme was sung by Waylon Jennings, one of the outlaws of country. This was also a time of peak popularity of Hee-Haw. The show reeks of the era of late seventies/early eighties. It was a simpler time, my wife would say a ‘whiter’ time. I can’t argue that, but what I am saying we were all united by less choices.

A few years ago, I was looking for something family friendly and I did end up buying the first episode on Amazon. I don’t think my kids enjoyed it as much as I did. But, it is a new day. My older son has a new appreciation for cars now and he is liking the idea of CB radio and driving passenger cars off-road. So, maybe we can try again.

End Your Programming Routine: After living in the south for a couple of years, The Dukes of Hazzard is not as big of a stretch as people living elsewhere might believe. There are still moonshine runners, there is a lot of debate over the confederate battle flag and racing is popular. I have heard of more than one person outrunning the cops when the ‘blue lights’ come on. But , so is doing the right thing when it matters. Big heart leaves me smiling after thinking about my time in the south as well as the Dukes of Hazzard.

November 14, 2023 – Review: Delicious!

November 14, 2023 /

I am running behind on things. “Delicious!” by Ruth Reichl was actually the August Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection. I think I found out about the book in late August and we had two books that month. I scanned through the cookbook in September and started reading this book about mid-October. I remember packing it with me on my hunting trip but didn’t make any progress.

What is different than the other work that I have read from Reichl is that this is her first attempt at fiction. To date, I have been a fan of her non-fiction as it is almost larger than life. I will remind you the Reichl was a food critic for the New York Times and dressed up as characters for restaurant evaluation so that she wouldn’t be outed.

This book has the same light, readability and feels in the same style as Reichl but is different. To me, the story meanders a lot without much of a point. I am trying to describe it without being too harsh. Characters kind of jump in and jump out and almost seems fluffy, like there was a lot of unnecessary plot line. Let’s go to the plot line first.

The book opens with the main character ‘Billie’ and her sister baking a gingerbread cake for her father’s birthday. This gingerbread is a theme throughout the whole book where she uses it to empress her potential employer in a job interview, her colleagues when they were down and anytime she wants to butter up someone for getting what she wants.

Billie is hired by the fictitious magazine Delicious! as a personal assistant to the general manager. After a short time, the magazine is closed but she is the only person kept on staff presumably because she was the cheapest. At this point, she has run of the office and the locked library where she serendipitously discovers some hidden letters to James Beard (a former Delicious employee).

The story goes on a wild goose chase of secret codes and tracking down people, meanwhile she is battling personal demons and falling in love. The whole point of all this is that Billie wants to see the whole picture so that an article can be written about this correspondence between a character Lulu and James Beard.

Maybe it is a writer’s thing, but I wonder what article she is going to write when the magazine is closed? I suppose that it could be a freelance piece, but throughout the book there is no mention of networking with other publishers. That seems a bit of a fantasy.

The story also contained some real non-sequitur parts as well. Billie meets an Italian butcher and family where she works all of her weekends. A lot of the book is devoted to this interaction that really doesn’t go anywhere in the storyline. Also, her father shows up out of the blue near the end of the book. He has been trying to get Billie to come home for the holidays for several years and yet she has refused to leave New York. All of a sudden they meet up at the same mid-western hotel when Billie is tracking information about Lulu.

It is not that I didn’t enjoy the story, it was fine but uninteresting. If I saw a book about letters from James Beard to some unknown person, I would skip it without a second thought. I certainly respect what Beard did for the culinary world, but it would seem like only a true groupy would be interested in this affair. The whole thing seemed a little forced to me.

One thing that I can say about the book (at least my version) has a section after the story about a suggested dinner party menu to go with the book. I wish that I would have known this when we had our book club meeting in August. We could have played on that theme a little bit when it came to making food.

I think that you will like this book if you find yourself turning on the Hallmark channel and getting vested with those types or movies. Or, the other type of person would be the one that fanaticizes about James Beard. You won’t like the book if you are into We or Anthem like I am currently reading. The story buttons up nicely with a few twists when you are vested in the characters.

End Your Programming Routine: Despite my opinion, I still highly recommend both Garlic and Sapphires as well as Save me the Plums by Reichl. It is not the author or the subject matter but this particular story for me. This is partially why it took me a month to get through this book, I just couldn’t get into it. That being said, it is nice to get out of the world of heavy fiction or cookbooks sometimes. That I can appreciate in this case.

November 10, 2023 – Anthem, Part 4-6

November 10, 2023 /

This was three quick chapters and in many ways not much has gone on. How could it, there are not many pages? If we try hard enough, then we can probably sift something out of this. That is what I am going to try and do.

I am not going to try and make something that it is not. Part 4 is and interaction between Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000. She is now calling him the ‘Unconquerable’. Part 5 has him discovering how a lightbulb works and keeping a secret and Part 6 is about Equality 7-2521 getting punished for staying in his secret lair too long. Unwilling to divulge the reason, he is beat severely. This causes him to have a plan and reveal the lightbulb at the Counsel of the Scholars who will meet shortly.

Suspending disbelief for a minute, how is it that this society has no modern utilities and yet somehow there is live power available for Equality 7-2521 to power a light bulb? When I was first reading the book, I thought that maybe he found a flashlight or something. To my knowledge, power needs continuous generation capability as well as infrastructure to deliver. Maybe some hydro-electric dam is generating power being used by the elites somewhere. At this point, we just don’t know.

So it is dystopian science fiction… alright then the bigger concept in these chapters is the ignorant messiah. Equality 7-2521 really believes that he is going to change the world by showing the Scholars what he has rediscovered. I think that we can see the foreshadowing of trouble ahead.

This reminds me of the famous historical figure Galileo Galilei. Today, he is a big name in science, particularly Astronomy, Physics and Math. We are probably all aware of his fate. Galileo promoted the idea of heliocentrism or better known as the planets revolve around the sun. This of course was labelled as anti-biblical and his ultimate fate was imprisonment until death.

I want to point out that many of these ideas were theories based on empirical observation. You see this is how science works. Perform an observation and then design an experiment to see if you can prove that your hypothesis is true or not. Galileo and other peers such as Brahe who worked to perform the mathematic supporting the observation. That was not quite good enough to keep him in the good graces of the church.

If you are going to play politics, then what side you are on is really more important than the truth. Galileo had a habit of backing the opposite side of who was in power. That really didn’t work out too well for him. Truth is not quite powerful enough when going against the state. The Catholic church has now changed it’s tune on on Galilei but who wants to be honored post-mortem, especially considering when a person was right all along?

I really don’t think that Equality 7-2521 is Ayn Rand’s Galilei but I suspect that his fate is going to end the same way. The establishment is going to come down on him like a house of cards and crush him. I suspect that some of these secrets like electricity are known by those that control society. Whether they use is or not is a different question, but don’t be surprised. Remember the mask mandates (you didnt think that was coming back did you).

End Your Programming Routine: It’s nice having a quick and short book to read. I am getting behind on my other reading and trying to catch up, this helps. Ignorance has its pluses and minuses and without it sometimes we don’t have heroes or huge scientific break throughs. WIth it, we often have martyrs.

November 9, 2023 – The Role of ‘Less Than Lethal’

November 9, 2023 /

I have finished my analysis of the Crossman 760. If you recall, this is my son’s BB gun that is multi-pump. Since you already know that I hate pumping, then you know that I don’t have a ton of interest in this platform. That being said, I got curious in the difference between this rifle and my Crossman Legacy when shooting BBs.

I am going to skip a lot of the technical information about this test and the results. But I will give you the bottom line. My initial hypothesis was that it took a certain velocity to stabilize BBs and therefore be more accurate. Unfortunately, even at the maximum number of pumps on the 760, the BB did not reach the same velocity as the most accurate number of pumps on the Legacy.

It does appear to me that there is one target slightly more accurate that the others. In this case it is the four pumps target. That correlates to an average velocity of 391 fps and energy of 0.7 ft/lbs. That is a far cry of difference from the Legacy that was most accurate at 608 fps and energy of 4.3 ft/lbs.

There are however many factors that impact the analysis of the results. The first is that I couldn’t validate my hypothesis in the first place. The max velocity of the 760 was 514 fps versus the most accurate level of pumping on the Legacy was 608 fps. Second and possibly more vital was that I have a scope on the Legacy and only have the open sights on the 760. It is entirely possible that the inaccuracy was due to the sight picture. I was hoping that I would be good enough the way things were to get comparable results. I have to say that is a variable that should be considered.

This post is more focused on what to do with this information. Since I have already announced that I hate to pump and the number of pumps for follow-up is what drove me to purchase another rifle the Optimus, is there any place for the Crossman 760 at home or homestead? The answer is yes.

First of all, never have a BB gun fight with something that is really going to hurt you. If you can’t tell, that was very strong sarcasm, don’t ever do that. But, thinking along those lines, maybe you want to discourage uninvited visitors. When we were kids, we used to shoot deer with our Daisy 840s that hopped into the garden and wrecked havoc on beans and everything else. I also know from hearsay that pellet rifle can kill a deer.

Other animals may be either pets or fall under the furbearing game regulations. Killing animals just might be a crime, not to mention many municipalities prohibit discharge of air rifles and bows. That being said, I think that a stinging BB is a perfectly acceptable deterrent in the right circumstances. Even though that cat pooping in your yard drives you crazy, just wait until you have to face them when you have shot and killed beloved ‘Fluffy’.

This is a very contentions subject in rural America. As we have a right to property, if someone’s pet is causing or potentially causing harm particularly to livestock, then we have a right to defend our property. Lethal force is permitted in those cases. All that is a subject for another day. My point is that you might want to have less than lethal options to avoid unwanted drama, legalities and other situations that may be uncomfortable at the least.

I do not know the exact energy that it takes to kill animals so it should be said that using a BB gun may also be risky if you are looking at non-lethal deterrents. I shot a lot of birds as a youth with my Daisy 840 which I calculate around 0.6 ft/lbs. That same rifle had no penetration on deer and racoons. Possibly better options include pepper spray works well for dogs or something like Airsoft that shoots a larger projectile at lower velocity.

End Your Programming Routine: Adding a scope ($12) to my son’s BB gun is certainly a strong possibility. I have half a notion to move the scope that is on my Legacy over to my son’s 760 and upgrading my own rifle. It is really a terrible piece of kit but it just may be slightly better than open sights, I don’t know. For now, I am going with four pumps is the optimum accuracy with that rifle. That makes my new hypothesis something like pump rifles are most accurate at pumping slightly less than half the total of pump capacity.

November 8, 2023 – Boots and Scars

November 8, 2023 /

I never set out to be a fashion writer, but here we are. Some of my youngest memories had me wearing cowboy boots. I definitely wore them in grade school. My last pair of boots I bought in college and I got a lot of wear from them until I started getting ingrown toenails. I have worn them now and again, but having surgery on my toes was painful and so I stopped except for very infrequent occasions.

My wife had already decided that our casual renewal was going to involve me wearing western wear. I took it upon myself to buy some new boots so that I had a pair that I would wear more than a couple times a year. So far, it has been a rough go with these new boots.

The first time I wore the boots was my second proposal on the beach. We had already planned on spending the night to take our exchange student out whale watching. I figured that I should get started breaking these boots in so that I would have a nice night on the renewal.

Other than causing ingrown toenails which I attributed to the pointy steel toe, I never had any issues with my old boots rubbing. That is not the case with these new boots which I purchased as square toe to alleviate that problem. I wore my boots for two days and I couldn’t wait to get out of them due to the fact that the pull straps had rubbed my leg raw.

I figured that I was committed at this point, so on the night of our renewal, I put Band-Aids over the area that the pull straps rubbed. That solved that problem for the moment. I have worn the boots several times until we decided to go to Octoberfest. That night I spent about four hours on my feet walking around. My heel started hurting.

When I took my boot off, my heel was raw. I should mention that all of this is really a problem with the right boot, not the left. For that reason, I don’t know if the problem is my right leg or the right boot. I have had zero issues with the left to date. I tried to do research on what others have experienced, and from what I have read, a potential problem is today’s thread.

Apparently, today’s thread contains synthetic material that is much more durable than previous versions. Because it is stronger and tougher, by proxy then it is more abrasive (at least that is what it said on the internet). If we accept that to be true, then it might be possible to add some kind of leather softener or treatment to potentially deal with the rubbing.

I tried these boot on when I walked through the store. It generally starts causing a problem after a couple of hours. If I knew then what I know today, these boots would have gone back to the store. I don’t think that they can be returned after several months of wear. This is something that I never considered to be a problem before these boots.

End Your Programming Routine: I still have my old boots. Part of my intent to buy new boots was to wear boots more, old and new. With these issues, I don’t know if I need to grit my teeth and keep wearing them, hoping that they will break in or give up. I will likely try to wear them more and hope that these are just starting point issues because they should last nearly the rest of my life. I don’t have much helpful advice but consider yourself warned if you are in the market for boots.

November 7, 2023 – Final AM Loop Antenna Results

November 7, 2023 /

Two worlds are colliding. The clean-up of the basement and my commitment to not leave things hanging have finally met. I wanted to get rid of this wire wrapped box that I have been hanging on to for almost two years now. But, I couldn’t get rid of it until I finally completed the modifications that I wanted to make.

One of the suggestions on my YouTube video was that my capacitor was not adequate. If you remember, it was an Aluminum foil wrapped card inside of an envelope. One of those was sandwiched between two others. The paper of the envelope acted as an insulator for the conductors and in theory, sliding the envelope back and forth was the fine tuning of the antenna.

I purchased an air capacitor that I see commonly used on DIY antenna videos. The plan was to replace the envelope capacitors with this relatively expensive component ($35) and hopefully this would be the trick. After the part arrived from Germany, I set about with this new round of experiments.

I decided to take what I thought was my worst AM tuner (an old Walkman… how about that) and the best AM tuner, my CCrane radio and test them outside and inside of the box. With the device inside the box, I would mess with the capacitor to see if there was any improvement in reception. Interestingly enough, the CCrane radio also has antenna inputs, so I tried that as well.

First of all, I will remind you that AM reception is directional. As far as I am concerned, I saw zero impact with respect to reception inside versus outside the box of either radio. It also appeared that any fiddling with the capacitor made no change to the reception. Orientation of the box with respect to the transmission tower did make a difference, but again there was no difference the radio itself.

What conclusion can I draw from this whole thing? The only thing that I can say conclusively is that this box antenna has no effect on reception. As a result I broke the whole thing down so that I could continue with my rampage of cleanup. I very well may try this again, but this time with different wire.

The wire I purchased was Aluminum at the second hand store. I wonder if changing from an insulated wire to a non-insulated one might help pick up signals. Buying a nice, new spool of wire kind of violates my principal of making this cheap or out of junk. To really get this dialed in on what components will work requires it to work in the first place. I just didn’t see that.

I don’t offer this enough, but if someone sees what I am doing wrong, by all means help me out. Now that I have outlaid the cash for a commercial antenna, I really don’t have any drive to put anymore energy into this endeavor. It is a good idea to learn from failure though.

End Your Programming Routine: When I first ran across the plans for this antenna, I had visions of young kids scavenging materials to gather around the radio and listen to a soccer game in some third world country. It may be that I don’t know what I don’t know but if that is the case, then this project is much more precise than I gave it (and I thought I followed the instructions to the letter). To be fair, I don’t have a full grasp of the science of antennas so it is possible that this can work, I have to say that my experience says it is not worth the time.